In 1940, The Museum of Modern Art staged a retrospective of the
work of Frank Lloyd Wright, the great American architect, then in
his 70s, who had experienced a professional rebirth over the
previous decade after many years of relative invisibility. Wright
was a full collaborator in the organization of the project, which
he intended, he said to be "the show to end all shows." To
accompany the exhibition, the Museum planned a publication in the
form of a "Festschrift, commissioning essays from many of the
best-known architecture figures of the day--Alvar Aalto,
Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Richard Neutra, Mies van der Rohe, and
others. Wright, however, took issue with certain parts of the book,
complimentary though it was, and after an incendiary exchange of
correspondence, including the architect's threat to cancel the
entire exhibition, the show went forward but the book did not. In
the 60-odd years since, the essays that MoMA commissioned have
remained in its files, most of them lost to public view. Now, for
the first time in one volume, MoMA is publishing the entire
surviving group, along with a full selection of the letters and
telegrams between Wright, MoMA, and others detailing MoMA's and the
architect's collaboration-cum-collision. Accompanying these period
documents is an extensive essay by the noted Frank Lloyd Wright
scholar Kathryn Smith, who provides a full account of the
exhibition, both as is was and as it was intended to be--including,
for example, an unrealized plan to erect one of Wright's Usonian
Houses in the MoMA garden. Smith also explores Wright's
relationship to his critics, the architectural profession, and the
Museum in the years leading up to the exhibition.
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